Harald Muenz
fein ... auflösend (2010-11)
For flute, clarinet, violoncello and piano
Commissioned by Kunststiftung NRW foundation
For the friends of ensemble mosaik: Bettina, Christian, Mathis und Ernst
Ensemble Mosaik: Bettina Junge - fl, Christian Vogel - cl, Mathis Mayr - vc, Ernst Surberg - pi
Score link: http://bit.ly/JljLXU
The quartet fein...auflösend (finely ... dissolving or resolving) is probably the most light-hearted of my pieces from the last few years. It has a lot to do with musical childhood memories of Christmas carols, which have always had a strong fascination as social topoï for me. Here they serve as a (largely hidden) compositional background for all sorts of rhythmic and harmonic proliferations as well as dissolution and expansion processes around the originals. The many tonal - or at times perhaps spectral - sound complexes are directly derived from the source material. The course of the piece is - in the tradition of Christmas medleys - slightly pastiche-like, a fact that seemed very fitting to me in this context. Very often melodic lines are entrusted in rapid change to different instruments, in order to blur them. To me, the piece contains very elementary traits of music making, with the block-like stasis of the music at the same time eating up the underlying traditional songs like an amoeba, in order to then build entirely different shapes from them. (Harald Muenz / Bob Gilmore)